The Body in Toronto

for the locals

The Body are playing tonight (sunday may 15th) at Parts and Labour with some other bands of little interest to me and probably most readers of this blog

go see them, not sure how well promoted the show is; their LP All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood was one of my favourites of last year

Meanwhile in Land Belonging to No One...

One last death rattle available in an edition of fifty copies for anyone still requiring a physical copy of Winter's Agony.

Here

You can still download it here

Australian playlist:

Arms Reach - Death to Shallow Hardcore
Deadstare - discography
Nekrasov - Into the No-Mans Sphere of the Ancient Days
Suffer - Lone (i'll keep plugging this LP)
Abraxis - Abraxis
Sadistik Exekution - K.A.O.S.
dISEMBOWELMENT - Transcendence into the Peripheral
Mournful Congregation - The Monad of Creation
Death Sentence - Ryan, Thanks for the Support
Mass Appeal - Nobody Likes a Thinker
AVO - Fuck Positive Hardcore

and two (not Australian) documentaries:

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
Who Took The Bomp? Le Tigre on Tour (if you're not a fan it's worth it for the stuff about Le Tigre and Hatebreed hanging out)

Just to Get Away

I semi-recently made a micro-run of a short (24 page) zine on touring called Just to Get Away.

I'll probably make more copies in the future, but you can download the electronic version here.

I put it together in part because it's something i'd been considering for a while and wanted to get my thoughts down on the topic, but mostly it's a test run for the Survivalist series of zines i'm in the process of putting together (more later).

Just to Get Away follows a relatively simple popular education how-to formula; i position myself in relation to the text, i list what i don't cover, i set out some "how-to" excercises (in popular education these wouldn't typically be "how to sell shirts" or "how to cross a border with a band", but i don't think that makes my case that this is a popular education text any less valid ) and at the end i return to positioning myself in the text.

The return to positioning myself within the text is the important part and in my opinion the rest of the zine really just props up that section. This is because i believe that the choices we make in this life are inherently political and i'm really just using the zine to underscore this.

No one else has to care about that aspect from Just to Get Away though, i'm just showing the mechanics at work.

The zine was originally given away at a popular education conference in Toronto and it shared physical space with zines on Hip Hop and collective education, physical activity and academic performance and using tea parties as a political/ educative process (tea party meaning where people get together and drink tea and talk, not where people shout dumb shit about how awsum 'Merica is and how those damn Muslims terrists are in league with the homosexes).

Re: Survivalist in print. Yes, i've probably been talking about this forever, but if i have an idea, mentally massage it to death and actually stick to the same idea over the period of about a year then i usually do something about attempting to manifest it in physical form.

Each issue will be on a single theme and won't be objective, it will be about my specific experiences and thoughts on the subject. Yes, they're going to be essentially ego-driven.

The first two are slowly being worked on concurrently, expect one of them before the end of the year, depending on other commitments. The third and fourth issues have their themes decided upon as well, but will take a bit more time to put together.

There's no great plan to how many issues i'll make, but i've committed to the first two, anything after that and we'll see how inspired i am.

This morning's listening:

Threshold Houseboys Choir - Form Grows Rampant
Antediluvian - Revelations in Excrement
Excruciating Terror - Expression of Pain

and Benedict Anderson's book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, is still blowing my mind for the third week running, well worth reading and then re-reading.

Clean House

My favourite new (ie they've existed less than two years and i've heard of them) local band made a video.



Bandcamp here for free downloads and all that malarky.

This song was recorded when Godstopper was still a one man operation, now they're a full band and playing live.

Some posts about new releases, both musical and written in nature coming later this week.

Probably a post about this photo in a month or two:

Reading:

Neil Strauss - Everyone Loves you when you're Dead
Joe R Lansdale - Complete Drive-in
Benedict Anderson - Imagined Communities
(the unfortunately named) Michael Jackson - At Home in the World
Dodgem Logic #7
Dead World Omnibus
Valdimir Nabakov - Invitation to a Beheading

Watching:

Venture Brothers Seaon 4
Sons of Anrchy Season 1
I Saw the Devil
Heartless
My Soul to Take (was expecting to hate this and it reeks of studio inteference, but there's suprisingly something very watchable about it)

Listening:

Whitehouse - Bird Seed
IRM - Four Studies for a Crucifixion
Hexvessel - Dawnbearer (probably contender for my favourite record of the year already)
Despise You/ ANb
Rot in Hell - As Pearls Before Swine
Socially Retarded/ Daisycutter
Vegas - Never to Wake
Moutheater - Colonial
Blut Aus Nord - 777
Ke/Hil - Hellstation
Suffer - Lone
Drainland - unreleased splits w/ Cellgraft and Trenches
Head Hits Concrete - unreleased split w/ Mudlark
Fudgetunnel - Sweet Sounds of Excess
Nekrasov - demos for next LP

Yes, i've had a week of ignoring all commitments other than feeding myself and the animals to indulge in all of the above.

Chromium Dioxide

New issue of Chromium Dioxide, Toronto's genetic experiment attempting to cross breed Cracked Magazine (when it was still seen as Mad's crappy little brother), Cinema Sewer, Bugs and Drugs and SOD Magazine (SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY SIX FUCKING SKULLS!!!!!). The loose connection to this blog is that one of the creators was in Slaughter Strike.

I haven't seen the current issue yet, but one feature is a round table "what went wrong?" discussion on Celtic Frost with Dave Adelson (20 Buck Spin), Dave Slimer (Slaughter Strike/ Chromium), Athenar (Midnight) and yours truly.

Buy it here.

Poly Styrene

I'm conscious of not posting everytime someone famous dies. Phil Vane, (friend and grindcore trooper) and Sleazy (one of music's most important creators and commentators) were two i couldn't let go with out saying something and Poly Styrene of X Ray Spex is someone else i would be remiss if i didn't say a few words about her.



I'll keep it short and break it down into two things, her importance to culture and her importance to me

Her importance to culture is pretty easy to define; she stood as a light in the darkness and paved the way for other incredibly important acts for years to come. Let us not forget she got her artistic start in an era even more hostile to to the idea of strong female artists than the one we're in now.

As an aside i'm mildly irritated when i see references to female performers in grindcore/ hardcore/ death metal etc reduced to things like "greatest female vocals on a hardcore record ever", as if "female vocals" is somehow a genre in and of itself outside of weird decaying second hand record shops where you'll still find Bolt Thrower in the Rock and Pop section. Or when gender is commented on when it isn't even necessary for a description.

Because to me Poly Styrene was one of the greatest vocalists full stop, not greatest female vocalists or greatest punk vocalists (or "greatest female punk vocalists from kent with Somlian heritage that only released one LP in their original incarnation in the late 1970s").

If i had a daughter i would be far more comfortable with her listening to Oh Bondage Up Yours than Beyonce's anthem to female un-emancipation, Single Ladies.



On a personal level (aside from just being really into X Ray Spex in a huge way), in a time past, when the contents of my mind were not always as well ordered as i'd have liked them to be, the song Plastic Bag meant a lot to me.

"My mind is like a switchboard
With crossed and tangled lines
Contented with confusion
That is plugged into my head
I don't know what's going on
It's the operator's job, not mine
I said"

Poly Styrene was diagnosed with a bi-polar disorder at age 34 after living with a wrong diagnosis of schizophrenia for several years.



Poly Styrene died yesterday from breast cancer.

Obituary here.

Never Forget